Blog first, portfolio second
Production Shaped
Essays and field notes about running small systems in real life: the house, the homelab, the agent fleet, and the bits of production thinking that do and do not survive contact with family life.
Latest essay
Busy and productive finally look identical
Fifteen production releases in 2 days, and the uncomfortable question of whether AI made me better or just better at slicing the work small.
Timeline
- essay
Tools I stole from work — New Relic
Second in the Tools I Stole From Work series: putting work-grade observability under a home network, and trimming the free tier when it hit 100GB.
- essay
Moving my skills and memory between agent tools
Moving a skill library and a file-based memory store between agent tools without copying either, by pointing both at one source of truth.
- essay
A short reflection after speaking with Adam about pixelmesh, and why LoopCoach should show AI improving quality of life rather than just productivity.
- log
Turned an old Nest into the office aircon dial
Flashed a Gen 2 Nest with No Longer Evil, self-hosted the control path on Unraid, and wired it into Home Assistant as the physical temperature dial for the garden office AC. It now handles heat/cool decisions, presence, opening sensors, active hours, override, fan speed, and quiet mode. Full write-up to follow.
- essay
One place for the agents: building an MCP hub
Consolidating MCP config from three agent tools into one self-hosted hub, and why I split it into themed namespaces instead of one catch-all.
- note
- log
Added layered monitoring for flaky WiZ Library bulbs
Reserved fixed IPs for the five Library WiZ Matter-over-Wi-Fi bulbs and changed Home Assistant to alert when either the Matter light entities or the Wi-Fi presence trackers drop offline. A quick search showed I am not alone with these WiZ bulbs needing power cycles or falling unavailable in Home Assistant.
- essay
A coding agent's biggest flaw isn't bad code - it's never knowing when to stop. Give it one ticket and it'll finish it, then suggest three more improvements. Each one is reasonable. Each one feels related. A few hours later, a simple fix has become a whole new project.